Iceland: Superlative Happiness on a Cold Little Rock
In a Reykjavik café last week, a tour guide named Anne told me it was because she found Icelanders so genuinely positive that she’d moved there from Germany. Her perspective on the country was engaging. When she volunteered six years ago to work there on a farm, she was struck by how welcoming everyone was; their daily up-beat greetings felt invariably genuine. Despite her short stay, she got to know many locals. When she visited a town bank two years later, they recognized her immediately.
Icelanders have been resilient and stoic in the face of disasters like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and the 2008 financial collapse that hit this tiny country hard. “The stoicism is important to deal with the randomness of nature and the recent financial crash,” Iceland embassy counselor Erlingur Erlingsson told me in Washington, D.C. Beyond stoicism, though, Iceland ranks as the third happiest country in the world — just behind Denmark and Costa Rica, according to the World Database of Happiness through 2009.
So when Ben Stiller said that it’s a good thing the sun never goes down “when the people are so good-looking,” he was not the only one to appreciate Iceland’s charms. This is a country where 73 percent of the people said they were content, compared with only 50 percent of Western Europeans and 33 percent of North Americans. It is “also happier than those who are doing better financially,” according to The Reykjavik Grapevine. When life expectancy is combined with happiness measures, it emerges first in “happy life-years.”
How do Icelandic people find the mental and physical resilience, in the face of winter darkness, volcanic eruptions, and financial disaster, to be among the first in global measures of happiness?